When it’s taken seriously—when systems, services and communities enable us to access wellbeing and to follow our inner drive for wellbeing—we have the fundamental ingredients for health and hope.

That access to wellbeing requires infrastructure. Not roads and bridges, but the places and spaces that support social connections and belonging; where the color of a young person’s skin or the language in which a parent prays for a child doesn’t increase or decrease their safety; where people actually can be agents in shaping their destinies, and more. This is the infrastructure of wellbeing.

The Full Frame Initiative is dedicated to increasing access to wellbeing for the people and families who have been struggling at the margins, often for years or generations. People who are caught in systems designed to solve specific problems that, in reality, often create new roadblocks to wellbeing, furthering downward spirals instead of helping people break cycles of poverty, violence, trauma and oppression.

Imagine a young mother mandated to attend parenting groups that conflict with her job, so she loses her job and then she can’t afford home heating oil in the winter. Her kids get sick when she tries to heat the house by turning the stove on all day, and the spiral continues.

This was never the intent of the parenting class mandate, but it is the impact when we don’t have the required infrastructure to support real change and progress.

Right now, more and more people in America feel the onramps to wellbeing are blocked or riddled with potholes, and their attempts to move forward only create more problems and less wellbeing.

We—together—can fix this: we can build a national wellbeing infrastructure so that everyone has equal opportunity for wellbeing, including those who are now the most marginalized. For that young mom, this means that instead of a mandated parenting class that creates more harms for her and her family, she is supported in finding a way forward that is meaningful and sustainable for her.

For FFI, this means continuing our groundbreaking work with government systems, nonprofits and communities that seek to transform themselves to be more effective, efficient and aligned with what people need and crave.

We can’t do it alone. It takes allies and advocates, champions and friends.

And it takes funding.

FFI’s work is more urgently needed and more relevant than ever. If you believe that wellbeing is essential, please give generously to pave the potholes and remove the roadblocks so that everyone has equal access to wellbeing.

The presidential election surfaced fissures that carve deep into the ideal of a common identity of America.

We at FFI are chilled, frustrated and outraged by the illumination of hate and base instincts of division and intimidation, and we are scared for and with each other and all the people across our country who are less safe than they were two weeks ago. We stand in solidarity with the many people writing and speaking about these real fears.

We are committed to being part of not just something that restores, but a movement that actually moves us all forward.

And we believe that an essential piece of the puzzle is wellbeing: a set of core needs and experiences we universally seek, in combination, and that we universally need for health and hope.

We all seek to be in relationships where we get and give value, to feel a sense of belonging to things bigger than we are; we need to know that core parts of our identity don’t expose us to danger or hatred; we need to know there are rhythms in our days and stability we can count on; we need to see that our actions and our work matter: that we have impact and can shape our future, our relationships, our environment; we need to be able to meet our and our children’s needs for food, clothing, shelter, school, health care, and more without shame or danger. And we all seek progress for ourselves and our loved ones, but in ways that don’t create havoc in other parts of our life.

These universal needs bind us all. Far from a nice extra, wellbeing is vital.

What the election surfaced is that across the country, and far more pervasively than many otherwise knew, people feel their wellbeing is thwarted and threatened. One possible response is to keep turning on each other and on the systems and institutions that should protect us, but that so many Americans no longer trust.

FFI rejects this, and we believe that many of you do, too. It’s a zero sum game if one person’s wellbeing is only increased when someone else’s is diminished.

The other possibility is actually a responsibility.

We all have a responsibility to steer into the magnificent and sometimes disquieting truth that we are more alike than we are different—not to excuse hate, vengeance, intimidation and oppression, but instead to address it head on and disarm it. To see each other in the full frame of our lives and align our interactions, practices, policies and institutions with what is required to provide equitable access to wellbeing. To create a space where one person’s wellbeing enhances another’s—not a zero sum game, but an exponentially more powerful and positive one. To leverage this moment not to get us back to where we were two weeks ago, but to really increase access for everyone, particularly those who grapple with poverty, violence, trauma and oppression.

FFI’s purpose is more relevant than ever. We will continue to support change that brings a wellbeing orientation to organizations, systems and communities, and we will accelerate our work to, in coalition and collaboration, assert a national right to wellbeing.

We cannot and must not do this alone. If you believe that we all have a right to wellbeing, please be in touch as we, together, shape a bright, urgently needed way forward.

For the last 18 months FFI has been engaged with four project partners and three California community-based teams in a collaborative initiative to apply asset-based strategies in addressing multiple forms of violence and oppression. Throughout the project, partners and teams explored what it really takes to move away from a problem-defined, deficit-based approach in order to improve access to wellbeing for the people, families and communities living through violence and oppression. This project summary shares the asset-based methodologies that were explored and lessons learned throughout the project.

A note from FFI’s Founder and CEO, Katya Fels Smyth, on the perils of seeming silent.
Tuesday afternoon, FFI signed off on our quarterly newsletter, and tee-d it up for an e-blast on Wednesday. And as it landed in people’s inboxes, video of Alton Sterling’s killing was going viral. And then, moments later it seemed, the surreal narration of Philando Castile’s killing amplified the horror. I am sickened, and I haven’t slept or concentrated well this week.

Only weeks ago, I wasn’t sleeping because there were more killings, these in Orlando. And while I wasn’t sleeping, I wrote the lead letter for our newsletter, the one that went out earlier this week. That letter was tied to a particular moment, and yet because I haven’t written letters for our newsletter about massacres in Charleston or the steady roll of thunder that is the violence gripping Chicago or the heroin epidemic in Baltimore or Appalachia, or the disparate length of time required to vote depending on what jurisdiction you’re in, or kidnapped girls in Nigeria, or any in the rain of inequity and violence, my representation of FFI’s attention and caring did not accurately reflect who we are or what we believe. That letter could be read as silent on acts of disappearing people beyond Orlando, including the extraordinary, corrosive, seemingly unending violence against blacks by some in law enforcement. And now I, like many of us, am sickened by the killing of law enforcement officers in Dallas and the reality that, for generations, violence has begot violence has begot violence and I’m afraid to see what the news will bring today or tonight.

Hopelessness and fatalism are deeply seductive, and it is tempting to go silent, and to fall into the privilege of not having to watch or see or speak. Yet the rain of horrors nationally, internationally is torrential. We at FFI have been talking deeply about these issues, and will continue to wrestle with our organizational response to them individually and collectively. And we will, so that timing issues which lead us to stand in solidarity in newsletters and elsewhere aren’t perceived externally (or internally) as an implicit organizational pecking order of atrocities. This isn’t to diminish Orlando, but it is to acknowledge that as we find our public voice, the perils of seeming silent—being silent—are real.

Recent events that seem to highlight the inequities in our systems and communities have given us pause to reflect on how the work of FFI and our partners is serving to stop the rain of oppression, hate and violence. Our summer newsletter illustrates what is happening with the growing energy around equitable access to wellbeing in systems, services and communities. Read it to learn about our wellbeing work in Missouri and California, check out our latest blog on social justice and evaluation, and meet our newest team members!

I am an activist who became a social scientist because I wanted to engage in more complex investigations of the systems that disenfranchise and marginalize vulnerable populations. Through these investigations I believed I could gather the evidence to make compelling arguments about how systems could reduce their harm and more effectively fulfill their responsibility to ensure all groups in society full, fair and equal treatment. Over the course of my career I have been a part of research and evaluation projects throughout the United States, mostly involving individuals with low income, low education attainment and who are of color. While engaged in the research I often thought about the late New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s statement, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” I thought of my role on the various research and evaluation teams as occupying that folding chair for disenfranchised and marginalized populations who were not invited to the table. However, what I know now is that occupying a folding chair at the table is not enough.

Several years ago I was the only person of color on a team of three individuals evaluating a workforce development program operating in a midsized city in the midwestern United States. Although the city is predominantly white, most of the participants in the program were of color—mostly Black and Latino. In addition, the administration and most of the program staff were of color. Throughout the latter half of the evaluation, the program director told the evaluation project manager that she was not comfortable with how the evaluation was being framed. The evaluation manager explained to her that the evaluation was already in process and that the integrity of the research would be compromised if a different frame of the evaluation were employed at that point. While I was not a part of the early conversations of the framing of the evaluation, nor was I in a decision-making position on the team, I believed my seat at the table could make a difference. I believed my participation could influence data analysis and recommendations and ensure that the realities of the study population’s lived experience would be central to the study.

The actual result of the evaluation was findings and recommendations that recreated policies and practices that were in alignment with best practices of program delivery, but not the lived experience of the program participants.

One recommendation was that the program be more flexible; however, the evaluation did not consider what “flexible” meant to the program participants. It did not ask what a participant might have to give up in order to meet the program’s requirements, or weigh if the tradeoff would be worth it for them in the context of their whole selves. For example, although adjustments were made to the program curriculum to be more flexible (e.g., participants were given more time to meet soft skill training goals), other policies were left unchanged. The program’s strict policy for program participants to be on time for classes, meetings, and counseling sessions created undue burden for some program participants, even while staff were reporting concerns about retention. Despite the new flexible curriculum, one particularly determined program participant could not sustain her participation in the program; the new flexible curriculum did not increase her access to the program.

The participant, who had been living in a shelter, managed to acquire a bike to get to and from the shelter and the program. Throughout the fall she was on-time and engaged in the program. Once daylight savings time began, she felt vulnerable because she was riding back to the shelter from the program in the dark. She could not take public transportation because its very limited route and hours of operation did not meet her needs. In addition, once winter began, despite wearing four coats, she was unable to successfully navigate the rain, ice, and snow to arrive to the program on-time; ultimately, she dropped out of the program.

Despite the program staff’s best intentions to prepare a very hard to employ population with remedial education, job readiness, and vocational training, some program requirements were too high a cost compared to dropping out of the program. Although program staff attempted to be more flexible in program delivery, our recommendations did not direct them to engage program participants in defining what a more flexible program would look like to them. While best practices serve a purpose, they are only effective if they can be operationalized within the context of the reality of the messiness of the lived experience. Because program participants were not seen in the full frame of their lives, they were required to make unsustainable tradeoffs to participate in the program.

Evaluation is not inherently benign. Who is sitting at the table not in a folding chair but in a decision-making chair matters. How an evaluation is framed and by who matters. Evaluators are the experts who lead the framing of the inquiry. Framing is imperative for determining the question or set of questions the evaluation will be focused on. The questions are critical for determining the methodology. The methodology determines what is critical for the evaluators to pay attention to. There are real consequences from how an evaluation is framed, conducted, and evidence marshalled; our findings are depended upon for making critical decisions about policy and practice. The consequences of not engaging the study population meaningfully in framing could result in policies and practices that not only continue to focus on problems not people, but also that continue to institutionalize injustice.

La Tonya Green, PhD is FFI’s Director of Evidence and Knowledge. She is responsible for generating knowledge and evidence about the applicability and effectiveness of the Full Frame Approach and the Five Domains of Wellbeing.

Want to make child welfare reform that lasts? Invest in supervisors—the people who oversee, guide, support and coach frontline workers who are in communities every day. In our partnership with Missouri Children’s Division, we are training all supervisors in the agency to incorporate an orientation around wellbeing and the Five Domains of Wellbeing into their supervision of and work with staff. Training frontline workers without training their supervisors creates friction and undermines change. Children’s Division supervisors are being equipped to drive, support and reinforce the changes being made as their agency adopts a new practice model based on child and family wellbeing.

As one Macon County Supervisor said after the training, “I am excited about coaching my staff to challenge and change their perceptions of families who have repeat involvement with CD and to help them see these families with a new lens that tells a ‘different’ more positive story about who they are.”

By this fall, every supervisor in the state’s child welfare department, and the supervisors’ supervisors, will have been through a two day intensive training, provided in small groups with follow up coaching. The results are already becoming apparent—seeing families in the “full frame” of their lives, leading to more trust and better information, which in turn helps the system make more informed decisions on how to best support children and strengthen families.

In conjunction with the winter Synergy publication featuring the work of FFI and its partner Missouri Children’s Division, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges’s Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody is hosting a webinar this week on Wednesday, May 18th, at 3pm EST. It is free to attend and the registration is open now! See the full webinar description and registration link below.

Wellbeing, the Missing Piece of the Safety & Permanency Puzzle: A Different Approach from Missouri Children’s Division

In 2014, Missouri Children’s Division began a system transformation to improve outcomes. A key strategy is considering not just safety but wellbeing from the first contact with a family. To support this effort, the agency has adopted the Five Domains of Wellbeing as the foundation of its philosophy and practice. On this webinar, the Director of Missouri Children’s Division and the CEO of the Full Frame Initiative will offer an overview of the Five Domains of Wellbeing framework, provide examples of how it is being applied in Missouri’s child welfare system, share preliminary observations and findings, as well as plans for the future, and discuss implications of this shift for families, workers, and partner agencies. The webinar will also include a discussion of the key factors in making the Children’s Division/Full Frame Initiative partnership robust, productive, and sustainable.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download the Synergy Winter, 2016 issue to read the related article “Wellbeing, the Missing Piece of the Safety and Permanency Puzzle: A New Approach from Children’s Division,” as well as other articles featuring FFI and our partners.

For more information or questions, please contact Alicia Lord at alord@ncjfcj.org.

FFI is experiencing increased demand for our work around the country, so we are again growing our team to support, shape and enhance our purpose. We are excited to announce four new open opportunities to join us and become part of a high impact social change organization that is working to increase access to wellbeing.

The open positions are Administrative Assistant, HR Generalist and two Training and Capacity Building Managers. Find out more and read the full job descriptions here!

The hunt is on for passionate, dedicated new talent to add to our already amazing team! Deadline to apply is May 30.

The Learning from What Goes Well Project held its second in-person convening on April 8-9 in Sacramento. Twenty-two participants encompassing community team members, organizational partners, and FFI staff focused on applying assets-based skills to a case study exercise as well as community teams’ initiatives, to build the practice of starting with what goes well. Tools that participants gained deeper knowledge in include community assets mapping, identifying community leaders and natural supports, and systems change strategies, among others. Working in a shared space cultivated stronger connections and opportunities for thought partnership and collaboration.

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Nine years ago, the Full Frame Initiative (FFI) was founded out of hope for what could beand frustration about what is. To this day, we stay centered on a central question: what if our service systems … Read More...

Statement on Equity and Social Justice

We believe equity and social justice are necessary for wellbeing--the needs and experiences required for health and hope. People experience barriers to wellbeing based on race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and other identities. In particular, racism is a key part of what keeps inequity alive in the United States. We believe that increasing access to wellbeing is necessary to end racism and advance racial equity. We are committed to addressing issues of racial and social equity in all our work.